Game Jolt

Game Jolt
Used to be good, now it's a wannabe Steam.
Language(s): Indonesian Malay German English European and Latin American Spanish French Croatian Dutch Norwegian Polish Brazilian and European Portuguese Romanian Finnish Swedish Greek Russian Simplified Chinese Founded: January 1, 2004 Founder(s): Yaprak & David DeCarmine Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Mac OS X Linux

Game Jolt is a hosting service for video games co-founded by David DeCarmine, where indie devs can distribute their games. They can also give updates to their games and announce if the game is in development.

Game Jolt used to be a solid site for indie developers, however it has became much more flawed over the years.

Why It Sucks Now

1. It has lately become a wannabe Steam. This may not be as bad as an alternative to Steam as was the case years ago. But now it has over a million (or at least a good estimate) shovelware games and asset flips.
2. Game Jolt has barely any quality control, making shovelware, poor quality games, and even asset flips as common as Steam has. The quality control is so bad, that it makes it difficult to find a good game. In some cases, shovelware devs PROFIT off their shovelware. In one instance, there were thousands of generic and poor quality Five Nights at Freddy's fan games
3. Some games never finish out or release of development. Some games are too good to be true, that they are sometimes fake, are hard to find, or the project is abandoned entirely. Some never get out of early access either.
4. Just like the previous items, many Steam shovelware devs flock to Game Jolt and in some cases, use both Steam and Game Jolt. Ata Berdiyev is a prime example, although he's said to be better on Game Jolt.
5. Sometimes, the "developers" use botted/fake reviews, or bribe others to download the game to get it promoted. For example, the horror games section has poor quality horror games, even in the best section.
6. Lack of system requirement tab to give an idea if the game runs on your system. fortunately, some devs give system requirements in their game descriptions.
7. Many developers can't handle the slightest form of criticism.
8. Tons of generic horror games, Five Nights at Freddy's fan games, FPS games, Sonic.EXE fan games, and Undertale fan games (poor quality ones).
9. As with the previous items again, Game Jolt doesn't do anything about the poor quality or shovelware games. This makes Steam's quality control actually decent (Steam rarely removes these games, but at least there's something, and they have curators, albeit flawed). Some of these games are so bad, that they might've been rejected by Steam Greenlight and other places.
10. Some games even have viruses or adware, sometimes malware, even though Game Jolt claims they check the games for it.
11. A lot of games require a specific system requirement in order to run, even if the developers use engines like Unity. Though there are games that are not well optimized to begin with.

Redeeming Qualities

1. There are a number of enjoyable games that deserve attention, despite some of them being hard to come by due to the problems listed above.
2. You can now make money from your games, although this attracts more shovelware developers.
3. YouTubers/YouTube channels can get a discount on games there.

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